Refraction

by Naomi Hughes

  The pain in my injured palm intensifies.

  Earlier, I’d let Mirage show me all this so that I could figure out a way to help him. A way to get him the power he needs to heal me. But that was before I understood the magnitude of what it would take to free up his energy.

  Everyone—the whole of Cisco Island, nearly three thousand people—would have to wake up. They would have to face the monsters, face their greatest fears, and step through the mirrors. And before all that, they would have to know to step through the mirrors. In the last thirteen months, exactly two people have done any of that, and one of those people only did it because I pushed him.

  I’ve found Elliott Ackermann, Mirage says into the silence, once again reading the direction of my thoughts. He is awake as well.

  I choke on a laugh. Elliott. I’d nearly forgotten that Mirage was running a search for him. And now that he’s found him, what am I supposed to tell him? That we can get to Earth—to the real world—where there’s no fog, no Beings, no Valkyrie Bridge and no mother to make him walk across it? I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want him to leave me.

  I can’t afford for him to leave me.

  Because I think … I think I might still need his help.

  An idea blooms in the back of my mind. It’s terrible. Risky. But it makes the desperation fade, just a little. Just enough.

  I lick my lips. “You said you’d heal me if you could,” I say to Mirage. “If you had enough energy.”

  Of course.

  “What if everyone woke up? Would that free enough of your power to fix me?”

  I—don’t know. I’ve never had to cure anything remotely like a Being sting before. But if I was no longer having to sustain any mental constructs or keep anyone’s physical bodies healthy while they sleep … I’m not sure. I think I might have enough energy to at least try to make you well again.

  “Good enough,” I reply. I step away from the wall. I don’t need to ground myself anymore.

  Mirage pauses, confused. But I’ve been trying to wake everyone for over a year and nothing has worked. And now I only have perhaps a few hours left before I crash.

  I move toward the door. At this distance, Ty’s image is distorted again, but that’s okay. I’ll see the real Ty soon.

  Whatever it takes. Still. Always.

  “Put us back in the dream,” I tell Mirage.

  What?

  I step past the couch. I barely notice the way the familiar carpet feels under my shoes. I don’t even look at the curtains. “Can you do that? Put us back on the island, in the shared dream?”

  I … think so. If you were to fall asleep, you should automatically be reinserted into their construct. I could probably direct an electric shock that would render you unconscious. I wouldn’t have any control over where you appear inside the construct once you’re there, though.

  “We’ll deal. Knock us out, me and Ackermann both.” I reach the door, put my hand on the knob. I grit my teeth and tap—trying not to feel the flash of relief it brings, trying to shove the shame of it down. I have more important things to focus on than my own failure now.

  I’m going to wake everyone up. I’m going to save the whole goddamned island, whether they like it or not. And Elliott is going to help me.

  I twist the doorknob. I step into the darkness, and it blinks out of existence. I’m kneeling on the rainbow floor, my left hand still pressed against the rippling colors on the ground.

  I glance at the sleeping form of the mayor. I’ll have to go toe-to-toe with her for the plan I’ve got brewing to work, and she won’t be asleep and harmless once I drop back into the dream. Part of me wishes I could just get rid of her right now, but for better or worse, I already proved back at the boardwalk that I don’t have murder in me.

  Shouldn’t you inform Elliott of what you’ve learned before you go back in? Pink uncertainty bleeds through Mirage’s words, the color surging around my hand as well.

  “No. I’ll tell him what he needs to know later.” Meaning I’ll tell him what I want him to think, to make certain he’ll do what I need him to. Guilt flits through the back of my mind and I shove that down alongside the shame. I’ve known for a year that I would do anything I had to in order to get to Ty. If that includes lying to the Boy Scout, so be it.

  Elliott would probably want to save everyone anyway, I tell myself. It seems like the sort of thing he’d do. But if I were in his shoes—if I could safely go home to a living world, if I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would never see my brother again no matter what I did—I’d leave everyone else behind in a heartbeat. Especially the guy responsible for my brother’s death.

  That’s a chance I can’t take. I can’t risk the possibility that maybe, deep down, Elliott might be like me after all.

  I lie on the floor. I stare up at the stars, then change my mind and roll onto my stomach. Earth glows beneath me, a sliver of its edge washed in the brilliance of dawn. I stare at it long enough for the lights to stay in place even when I close my eyes.

  I’m coming, Ty, I promise silently. Whatever it takes.

  “Okay,” I tell Mirage. “Do it.”

  Good luck, he whispers.

  An electric jolt sparks in my brain. I jerk once. And then I wake up on Cisco Island.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AND PROMPTLY FALL FLAT ON MY FACE.

  Splat. I manage to catch myself on my hands and knees in ankle-deep standing water. It immediately soaks through my clothes—the old shirt and jeans I was wearing back in the clearing, along with my socks, as I’m once again shoeless. Cold wetness sluices over me and I shiver.

  The ripples of my landing flatten out. The water is still. I spot my reflection—lank dark hair, pale skin, black veins creeping under my sleeves—and instinctively scramble backwards, my brain screaming, Mirror!

  “What are you doing? Stop making a scene,” hisses an unfamiliar voice.

  I go still. I don’t reply, for fear my voice will be recognized by whichever islander is addressing me.

  But someone else replies for me. “The mayor is the only one allowed to make a scene,” she quips, half mocking and half bitter. The first voice shushes her.

  My pulse stutters. I wouldn’t have any control over where you appear, Mirage said. Apparently he wasn’t joking. Wherever I’ve landed, there are at least two people who don’t seem to have noticed my appearing-from-thin-air trick but still might recognize me at any moment. The best I can hope for is that these two islanders are the only ones nearby. I can handle two people. But the way they were talking about the mayor kind of made it sound like …

  I pray very hard—apparently all it takes is a life-threatening situation or two to make a convert out of me—and turn my head.

  Shoes. Lots of shoes. Attached to lots of feet.

  Mirage has dropped me in the middle of a crowd.

  I swallow. My pulse climbs. I spend a beat trying to convince myself that I can just stay down here on the ground, but deep down I know that makes me even more likely to draw attention and get recognized, so I clamber to my feet. I keep my head down, hoping my hair might hide my face.

  But when the mayor’s voice rings out, my head snaps up.

  “As one of the few remaining bastions of humanity,” she says, and hate instantly floods my veins at the reminder of her lies about London and Singapore, “we can no longer tolerate those who would harm our good citizens, who would drain our precious resources. Especially after the tragic loss of our helicopter and any supplies it might have been able to gather.”

  Her voice is strong and clear and marbled with a grim sort of certainty. It draws my gaze upward against my will. I fight the urge to look as long as I can, but it takes everything I’ve got, and as a result I don’t process her words for a moment.

  Then I understand; they lost the chopper. The night it dropped us off, it never made it back. Either the pilots didn’t have enough experience to make it through the storm or Beings got them. They never brought any reso
urces back to the island.

  “I’ve long delayed enacting true martial law,” she continues. “I required clear proof to convict criminals, kept the judicial process intact. I wanted to preserve our humanity—preserve the rights our country fought for—but the cost has become too great.”

  I dare to allow myself a quick glimpse at my surroundings. I’m fenced in by a mob. Hundreds of islanders in ponchos and rain boots, standing in the water that’s flooded the street, staring forward at … shit, shit.

  Valkyrie Bridge.

  This is an exile ceremony.

  The sky is overcast with a strange, eerie yellow tint. Several of the coconut palms next to the bridge are downed, and leaves and felled branches litter the road around us. I can hear thunder nearby, rolling in from the sea as well as from across the sound—but it’s overshadowed by birdsong. Every bird in the world has been locked in an echo chamber with us, from what I can tell. I spot two little gray and white terns trying to huddle beneath a hulking pelican atop one of the downed palms, and a whole flock of shrieking seagulls circle overhead.

  As a native Floridian, I know exactly why the birds are here. We’re in the eye of the hurricane. The only safe place for miles.

  “That’s the reason for today,” the mayor is saying now. “We all mourn the necessity of the new exile policy. But we can no longer waste our precious resources on jailed criminals. We can no longer hold ourselves to a due process standard that doesn’t work. We have purged the island of mirror dealers; now we must make certain that our city will no longer be an environment that allows new ones, or any criminals, to flourish.”

  My head snaps back to the mayor. A slow horror ices through me at the look on her face, that awful, familiar steel-and-bone expression. She’s standing at the bridge’s entrance, surrounded by the Valkyrie warrior statues as if she has any right to a place among them. At her back, a few yards in front of the fog, every cop on the island stands shoulder to shoulder, weapons drawn, eyes on—

  —on the prisoners kneeling in front of them.

  The pit of my stomach drops. There are dozens. There’s one middle-aged woman I recognize from a few months back, who got caught stealing beans out of the dispensary and was jailed for it. Next to her are two college-aged guys—one with a black eye, one who’s silently sobbing—who I’m acquainted with through my black-market contacts. They sell fish illegally, I remember. But they never got caught. They’re way too slippery to give the cops the proof they’d need to exile them. Then again … I guess the cops don’t need proof anymore.

  Rations are getting low, and the mayor is desperate, Elliott told me at the boardwalk. Apparently that much wasn’t a lie. She’s going to exile all these prisoners in the middle of a hurricane no matter how trivial their crimes, because she doesn’t want to waste supplies on them for even one more day.

  A helpless anger burns through me, and I try to swallow it down. These people don’t matter to me. I shouldn’t care what the mayor does to them; two dozen fewer people on the island is two dozen fewer people for me to try to wake up. But I clench my jaw anyway, imagining the screams that’ll echo over the bridge in just a few moments, the way they’ll cut out one by one. There are mirrors up there, in the fog just past the Valkyrie statues. That’s how the residents of Cisco Island get rid of any reflective materials that can’t be ground up into powder or discarded safely in the mines. It’s also how they ensure that exile results in a suitably horrible death. Like the kind I’m facing, if I fail.

  I take a slow, deep breath. Focus. I have to focus. This exile ceremony could actually be good news for me, for my mission. I need a way to get a message out to as many islanders as possible, as quickly as possible, and the equipment I need to do that is usually present at exilings.

  I scan the ground in front of the mayor. There: a chestlike box with blinking red lights and rows of dials and switches. The radio transmitter. I smile, the expression feeling vicious. I thought I was going to have to hunt this down, steal it right out of City Hall. Instead I can take it now, and maybe give these prisoners a chance to escape the mayor’s “justice” to boot.

  First, though, I need a distraction.

  I turn my head, searching for something that might work to throw the mayor and the cops off for long enough to let me steal the transmitter. If I had a mirror, that would do the trick, but my thoughts alone won’t work to summon one here. Mirage said that Cisco Island is stable because of everyone’s expectations working together. Their minds are a grinding machine, and my will is nothing against it.

  At that thought, an unexpected quicksilver relief pours over me. I can’t change anything here. Can’t summon up my fears, can’t let my uncontrolled thoughts loose on my world. I am safe.

  I hold back a manic laugh. I am the farthest thing from safe in the world. The woman who sentenced me to a horrific death is less than twenty yards away. I shouldn’t feel comforted just because my stupid brain can’t conjure up scary things.

  I shake my head and force myself to focus. I’m still scanning the crowd for inspiration, for something that might work as a distraction. My gaze snags on someone a few rows ahead of me. There’s something familiar about those tense shoulders, the sharp lines of that square jaw—that pretty-boy blond hair.

  Elliott. He’s here. Less than a hundred feet from his mother.

  Go ahead, shoot him, she told me back at the boardwalk. That’s what she’ll say now, too, if she spots him.

  He knows that. He knows what she’ll do to him, what she’s already done to him. But he isn’t trying to keep his head down. He isn’t trying to hide or blend in with the crowd or quietly escape. Instead, he’s staring right at her, like he wants her to see him.

  Because of course he wants her to see him.

  That idiot. Is he still trying to rationalize her actions? Does he truly still think, deep down, she might actually care about him? Is he even thinking about what would happen if he’s spotted—the pandemonium it would cause when every cop on the bridge comes after him?

  I pause. I let the scene sit in my mind for a second as another probably-bad idea forms. I was just wishing for a distraction, and now Elliott’s handed me one on a silver platter. And a way to get him out of here too, before he gets any bright ideas about turning himself in to his mom.

  I wait until the mayor turns to glance at the opposite side of the crowd. Then, as slowly and casually as I can, I weave between the three people separating me and Elliott.

  I reach him. He’s looking straight ahead, laser-focused, as if his mother is the only person in the world. I remember how empty his eyes were the last time he saw her. They’re not empty anymore, but the emotion in them is something too private and painful for me to have any right to name, so I lean in and speak instead.

  “Thirty feet north down this road is a storm drain. The grate comes up easy,” I say in a low tone.

  He startles, his gaze darting to me. His eyes widen and that painful emotion washes away, replaced by alarm. “What are you doing here?” he whispers, then shakes his head, a tiny flick of a motion. “I don’t know what’s going on or how we got back, but you have to get out of here. She’ll see you.”

  “No. She’ll see you,” I say. “The storm drain leads to the sewers, which eventually connect to the mines. Underneath the southernmost part of town is an old hydraulic elevator with a padlock on its back wall. Find it and wait there.”

  He stares at me for a second. Then his eyes drop to my arm. To the black veins that are creeping higher by the minute. Something flits across his expression, softening it. “No,” he says. “You go. I’ll cause a distraction.”

  I bite back a groan. He has to make everything harder, doesn’t he? Stupid hero. “Yes, that’s kind of the point,” I say, a little ruefully.

  His eyes narrow. He knows me well enough to be suspicious, but he’s also remembering how I grabbed that scorpion off him, and how I’m dying for it now.

  Not for much longer, though.

  I cut
off his internal debate. “Good luck,” I tell him, echoing Mirage’s words from earlier.

  His whole body goes tense. “Callahan. What are you talking about?”

  I take a long step back. I put myself between him and his mother, cutting off the line of sight between them, being careful to keep my own face hidden. Then I point at Elliott and yell: “Oh my God, he’s got a mirror!”

  The crowd explodes.

  The islanders scream and flee in every direction. Water splashes everywhere. The birds on the ground nearby take flight, a chaos of feathers and screeching. A gun fires into the air. The mayor yells and leans to the side to try to see who I’m pointing at. When she can’t get a good angle she strides into the mass of panicking humanity and starts shoving people, making her way in our direction. A good two-thirds of the cops scramble to follow.

  “What the hell,” Elliott snarls at me, but he doesn’t get any further than that, because I shove him hard.

  “The storm drain, idiot,” I hiss at him.

  He hesitates. He glances around, but I’m still blocking the line of sight between him and his mom. He looks back at me. “Callahan, I have no idea what you’re doing, but if we get out of this alive—”

  “You’re going to kill me, yeah, yeah,” I say, and shove him again. I raise my voice. “Oh my God, the mirror! It’s somewhere on the ground, where did it go?!”

  More people scream. Several are knocked over, and their flailing bodies trip others, putting more obstacles in between us and the approaching cops. Elliott lets out a string of curses and then, finally, runs northward.

  I turn toward the bridge. Several of the more industrious prisoners are leaping up and scuttling into the crowd, while others are frozen. The radio transmitter is on the ground, unguarded. I start toward it.

  Someone knocks into me. I spin sideways, catching myself against another body. The man shoves me away, gets a good look at my face, then gasps and yells my name. A cop a few yards away hears and turns to look. It’s an older black officer, and at the sight of his face I can almost hear his voice calling my name like we’re old friends. Ginger’s partner.